On 09/23/2015 10:21 AM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
On Sep 23, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

From: Toby Thain

It did exist for some exotic, word addressed architectures

{Innocent look}

You mean, like the PDP-10?

{Ducks!}

Noel

Strangest C I saw was on a DPS-8 mainframe running GCOS-8.

Zane

Well, there are plenty of word-but-not-byte/character addressable machines out there, which makes life interesting for the likes of C. FORTRAN (at least FORTRAN IV) never had any problems with that, as the CHARACTER datatype didn't yet exist in the language, but for the occasional vendor "extension". Later versions of FORTRAN/Fortran, of course did.

The CDC 6000 series for example. Ones complement, 60-bit word-addressable system used well into the 1980s, as opposed to bit-addressable CDC machines like the STAR. Interestingly COBOL on the 6000 easily outran most COBOL implementations on byte/character-addressable machines.

One thing that I've wondered about is "does the current HLL-du-juor dictate processor architecture?"--and not the reverse. Does anyone consider a machine that doesn't implement any sort of hardware stack, for example, a marketplace contender?

--Chuck

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